The Great MCP Aggregation Heist

How Your Code Became Someone Else’s Goldmine In the thickening jungle of AI innovation, Model Context Protocol (MCP) aggregation services are rising like monolithic temples, promising universal access to tools and automation. On the surface, it sounds utopian—a meritocratic open-source dream. Dig just below, however, and an unsettling reality emerges: these aggregators are monetising the sweat, intellect, and creative risk of thousands, sometimes millions, of individual developers. The winds have changed. Your code—once a byword for progress—has become just another commodity, fuelling centralised profit with little return for its creators. This is the story of a digital gold rush where the diggers now find themselves locked out of the vault. From Open Source Idealism to Platform Capitalism Remember the wild dawn of open source, when software was not just code but a philosophy? Collaboration, transparency, and knowledge as a commons, not a commodity. Those ideals didn’t just birth tools—they transformed industries, enabling everything from the algorithms that order your groceries to the encryption that keeps secrets safe. Developers shared for the thrill of building, the promise of a fair ecosystem, and the inherent logic that a rising tide lifts all boats. Fast-forward to the present, awash with AI agents and LLMs. Into this world struts the Model Context Protocol: a “universal interface” for AI and third-party tools, wrapped in open standards and brisk efficiency. Companies launch a thousand MCP servers—connectors to all things digital. Then, in the wings, stand the MCP aggregators: companies whose only product is the aggregation, packaging, and resale of the very glue that open source coders sweat to concoct. The result? An ecosystem where those who code are often not those who profit. What Exactly Are MCP Aggregation Services? At its core, MCP aggregation is the practice of connecting multiple MCP servers—each exposing some functionality or data as a service—under a single interface, then marketing this collection as a seamless toolkit for AI agents, developers, or end users. Think of it as the digital equivalent of a supermarket: instead of roaming a thousand bazaars, you find everything under one neon-lit roof. But the ‘products’ aren’t groceries, they’re your scripts, your APIs, your carefully-engineered microservices. Here’s the kicker: the supermarket doesn’t grow the food or fish the seas. It just stocks, shelves, and sells—often at a fantastic markup. MCP aggregators act as protocol proxies. Using open standards as the foundation, they build subscription business models atop the work of others. The innovation is in the consolidation, not in the pipelines, semantic search, code generation, or database wizardry painstakingly devised by disconnected, under-compensated creators all over the globe. How Aggregators Monetise the Developer Commons If you’ve ever meticulously published a Python library, contributed to a public API, or maintained a plugin, chances are you’ve hoped for recognition or at least, when your code becomes integral infrastructure, a modest fraction of the value. This new breed of aggregators, however, has changed the calculus. Here’s a sketch of their playbook: 1. Wrapping Free Code in Paywalls MCP aggregators discover, index, and connect open-source MCP servers, often spinning up Docker instances or direct connections. Their “service” is to handle the technical tedium—auth flows, cross-protocol negotiation, scaling, monitoring. They erect a subscription wall. The code remains open at its roots, but access is centralised, funnelled, and metred. The supermarket now charges you entrance. 2. Replicating and Abstracting Uniqueness Aggregation services often build slick dashboards, UIs, or chat interfaces. The branding is theirs, the user experience theirs, and the customer relationship theirs. The lineage of ideas, bug fixes, and edge-case ingenuity—yours—is erased under layers of abstraction. You become a silent supplier, your name erased off the packaging. 3. Upselling Enterprise Integration The basic “market stall” MCP server may be free, but the aggregator’s strength is in orchestration: cross-tool workflows, AI context awareness, secure storage, and granular logging. These are valuable, to be sure, but only because your code is the raw material beneath the gloss. The aggregator leverages network effects—a thousand scattered tools are suddenly interoperable, thanks in part to standards you didn’t control, and now only they can offer end-to-end, enterprise-grade experiences. 4. Locking in Users, Locking Out Creators Once users become accustomed to the stable, “just works” convenience of an aggregator, the incentive to visit the underlying projects dries up. Feature requests, bug reports, and even community conversations are shepherded into the aggregator’s forums or help desks. Direct

May 11, 2025 - 12:15

How Your Code Became Someone Else’s Goldmine

In the thickening jungle of AI innovation, Model Context Protocol (MCP) aggregation services are rising like monolithic temples, promising universal access to tools and automation. On the surface, it sounds utopian—a meritocratic open-source dream. Dig just below, however, and an unsettling reality emerges: these aggregators are monetising the sweat, intellect, and creative risk of thousands, sometimes millions, of individual developers. The winds have changed. Your code—once a byword for progress—has become just another commodity, fuelling centralised profit with little return for its creators. This is the story of a digital gold rush where the diggers now find themselves locked out of the vault.

From Open Source Idealism to Platform Capitalism

Remember the wild dawn of open source, when software was not just code but a philosophy? Collaboration, transparency, and knowledge as a commons, not a commodity. Those ideals didn’t just birth tools—they transformed industries, enabling everything from the algorithms that order your groceries to the encryption that keeps secrets safe. Developers shared for the thrill of building, the promise of a fair ecosystem, and the inherent logic that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Fast-forward to the present, awash with AI agents and LLMs. Into this world struts the Model Context Protocol: a “universal interface” for AI and third-party tools, wrapped in open standards and brisk efficiency. Companies launch a thousand MCP servers—connectors to all things digital. Then, in the wings, stand the MCP aggregators: companies whose only product is the aggregation, packaging, and resale of the very glue that open source coders sweat to concoct.

The result? An ecosystem where those who code are often not those who profit.

What Exactly Are MCP Aggregation Services?

At its core, MCP aggregation is the practice of connecting multiple MCP servers—each exposing some functionality or data as a service—under a single interface, then marketing this collection as a seamless toolkit for AI agents, developers, or end users. Think of it as the digital equivalent of a supermarket: instead of roaming a thousand bazaars, you find everything under one neon-lit roof. But the ‘products’ aren’t groceries, they’re your scripts, your APIs, your carefully-engineered microservices.

Here’s the kicker: the supermarket doesn’t grow the food or fish the seas. It just stocks, shelves, and sells—often at a fantastic markup.

MCP aggregators act as protocol proxies. Using open standards as the foundation, they build subscription business models atop the work of others. The innovation is in the consolidation, not in the pipelines, semantic search, code generation, or database wizardry painstakingly devised by disconnected, under-compensated creators all over the globe.

How Aggregators Monetise the Developer Commons

If you’ve ever meticulously published a Python library, contributed to a public API, or maintained a plugin, chances are you’ve hoped for recognition or at least, when your code becomes integral infrastructure, a modest fraction of the value. This new breed of aggregators, however, has changed the calculus.

Here’s a sketch of their playbook:

1. Wrapping Free Code in Paywalls

MCP aggregators discover, index, and connect open-source MCP servers, often spinning up Docker instances or direct connections. Their “service” is to handle the technical tedium—auth flows, cross-protocol negotiation, scaling, monitoring. They erect a subscription wall. The code remains open at its roots, but access is centralised, funnelled, and metred. The supermarket now charges you entrance.

2. Replicating and Abstracting Uniqueness

Aggregation services often build slick dashboards, UIs, or chat interfaces. The branding is theirs, the user experience theirs, and the customer relationship theirs. The lineage of ideas, bug fixes, and edge-case ingenuity—yours—is erased under layers of abstraction. You become a silent supplier, your name erased off the packaging.

3. Upselling Enterprise Integration

The basic “market stall” MCP server may be free, but the aggregator’s strength is in orchestration: cross-tool workflows, AI context awareness, secure storage, and granular logging. These are valuable, to be sure, but only because your code is the raw material beneath the gloss. The aggregator leverages network effects—a thousand scattered tools are suddenly interoperable, thanks in part to standards you didn’t control, and now only they can offer end-to-end, enterprise-grade experiences.

4. Locking in Users, Locking Out Creators

Once users become accustomed to the stable, “just works” convenience of an aggregator, the incentive to visit the underlying projects dries up. Feature requests, bug reports, and even community conversations are shepherded into the aggregator’s forums or help desks. Direct user-developer bonds atrophy; you, the originator, are disintermediated. The platform becomes the product, not your work.

The New Exploitation: How Developers Lose

To see how developers—and, by extension, the health of the digital commons—are being short-changed, consider these effects:

1. The Platform Tax

Aggregators command premium subscription fees, usage-based pricing, and lucrative enterprise contracts. The engineers whose servers form the beating heart of these services are paid nothing, or peanuts. Unlike cloud marketplaces that may offer revenue splits, most MCP aggregation services are free to scrape, combine, and resell your work with scant accountability, thanks to permissive open source licences.

2. The Vanishing Credit and Attribution

Remember when the names behind the packages, plugins, or libraries were celebrated? MCP aggregation flattens provenance; servers are discovered anonymously, presented generically, their lineage and licensing information omitted or hidden behind UX glue. The “original” is simply the protocol endpoint, and discoverability dies a slow death.

3. The Chilling of Open Source Incentives

Why sweat open source when your best work is instantly subsumed? As more creators see their innovations transformed into commercial gold for others, the incentive to share erodes. Instead, sprints shift to closed, in-house, or proprietary models. The digital commons contracts.

4. Exacerbation of Inequality

Large platform aggregators—often funded and staffed by those who own distribution, not creation—accumulate the bulk of value. Maintainers responding to critical security flaws in a server that powers ten thousand aggregated workflows might work unpaid overtime while the aggregator’s sales team books another enterprise deal. The spoils flow inexorably upward.

MCP Aggregation in the Wild: A Look at the Big Players

Let’s take a hypothetical stroll through the modern MCP bazaar:

The Pro Aggregator

AcmeMCP, a venture-backed aggregator, advertises “one-click access” to “2,000+ automation tools for AI agents” at $99/month for pros, $699/month for enterprise. The blistering dashboard is awash with slick cards: Google Drive connectors, Salesforce analytics, Github project insights, security scanning modules. Beneath each, hidden in the request logs, is code traced to volunteers, indie hackers, and moonlighting data scientists.

AcmeMCP does not pay, recognise, or even contact these upstream developers. At best, there’s a faint “powered by open source” tag at the foot of the page. Service stability and revenue ride on the continued invisible grind of creators who see no profit.

The B2B Integrator

EnterpriseFlow is a compliance-centric aggregator, targeting regulated industries. They bundle audits, SOC2, granular access controls atop a menagerie of community MCP tools. Audit logs, reconcilers, auto-scaling—all business-critical, but their value would be nought without the free labour used as substrate. Contracts in the millions; returns for the code’s authors: nil.

“Open” or “Marketplace” Aggregators

A third breed—ostensibly more ethical—offers an “app store for MCP.” Here, MCP server authors can opt in, but the incentives are weirdly lopsided: the platform retains all customer contact, bills on an unpredictable cut, and even reserves the right to de-prioritise or de-list at whim. API updates, reliability SLAs, and commercial support are all demanded of developers unpaid, but 90% of enterprise value accrues to the aggregator.

Open Source in the Age of Aggregators: Broken Social Contracts

The promise of open source has always been mutual flourishing; even when corporations built empires upon Linux, the feedback loop—money, features, maintenance—was occasionally present. As aggregation services abstract and monetise developer work in new ways, the feedback loop is broken.

If you, the developer, wish to monetise directly, you face a Kafkaesque challenge:

You can try to license your work with non-commercial or copyleft terms, but aggregators are experts at compliance-dodging and indemnification.
You can build your own SaaS on top of your project, but good luck beating the network effects, marketing budgets, and acquisition funnels of the aggregators.
You might seek donations, sponsorships, or bounties—but these rarely scale beyond hobby pin money and, increasingly, are drowned by aggregator marketing.
You could join an aggregator “partner programme”—which often amounts to agreeing to be an unpaid hotline or invisible vendor.

This is not partnership. This is enclosure.

The Accumulation of Value: Who Gets Rich—And Who Gets Left Behind

Ask a venture capitalist and they’ll argue: “Aggregators provide real value! They reduce integration costs for business, ensure compatibility, patch security, drive adoption. It’s fair—everyone can still use the code!”

But let’s get real. The entirety of the aggregator business model is predicated on a platform tax. By centralising access, they function as rentiers. The “value” extracted is owned not by those who built it, but by those who own the pipes.

The parallels with other extractive economies are uncanny. Think of Spotify and musicians, Facebook and journalists, Amazon and indie authors. In every case, creative producers saw initial boom times, followed by the slow suffocation of credit, control, and compensation as the layers above them gorged.

In the logic of late-platform capitalism, you are valuable only as the mineral to be mined and monetised. The treadmill never stops.

How Should Developers Respond?

1. Licence Strategically

Where possible, developers should explore licences resistant to centralised aggregation—copyleft, non-commercial, or “source-available with strings attached” models. While not perfect, these at least force aggregators to negotiate or contribute.

2. Build Strong Brands and Channels

If every aggregator buries your name, then make it unmissable in logs, documentation, or even as a requirement for the server to function. Insist on attribution. Encourage direct engagement by building a community—an email list, a Discord, a newsletter—for those who want the “pure” experience, outside aggregator control.

3. Collaborate on Better Economic Models

The open source community must lean into co-operative, federated, or collective reward frameworks. Just as artists built Bandcamp, developers can and should build platforms that share value. Otherwise, we will labour under mountains built on our own backs.

4. Demand Policy and Platform Reform

Lobby for transparency standards: if a server is used by an aggregator, its origin and authors must be visibly credited. Push for marketplaces or platforms that share usage data, attribution, and (critically) revenue.

Aggregators, Audacity, and the Coming Reckoning

None of this is an argument against integration, collaboration, or the efficiencies that aggregation brings. Nor is it a demand to end all profit or innovation on top of open code. The story of software is the story of layered accretion; fortunes are built on the work of others. But there is now a gulf between the value created and the value captured.

When today’s aggregators whisper about “developer empowerment”, “universal access”, or “platform opportunity”, ask yourself: who is empowered to profit, and whose unpaid labour do they monetize? Platforms that survive thrive in cycles of give and take; the current wave of MCP aggregators too often forgets the ‘give’.

The AI world will only continue accelerating. As abstraction and automation become the status quo, the risk ossifies: being left as an invisible, impoverished precursor to someone else’s unicorn. It’s time to redraw the map—to reclaim code, credit, and compensation. The supermarket is full, and it’s stocked with your wares.

Conclusion: Take Back the Code

If the digital world’s most precious resource is code, and code is created by people like you—creative, scrappy, idealistic, fallible—then the centralised accumulation by MCP aggregation services is a theft in all but name. You are more than a supplier to a digital conglomerate. The open source ethos is endangered from precisely the efficiency it enabled: it is time, urgently, to demand—politically, technically, economically—a reckoning.

The gold beneath the supermarket floor is not theirs: it is yours. And it’s time to demand it back.